Mark Twain

Mark Twain’s first article in Harper’s was misattributed to Mark Swain. The story, “Forty-three Days in an Open Boat” (December 1866), is an account of the Hornet, a clipper ship that caught fire in the ocean, leaving its crew adrift. Twain referred to it as the “first magazine article I ever published,” though he had published numerous pieces in other periodicals and newspapers under such names as Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass; W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab; Rambler; Grumbler; and Peter Pencilcase’s Son, John Snooks.

Twain was born thirty-one years earlier, and two months premature, as Samuel Langhorne Clemens, in Florida, Missouri. “When I first saw him I could see no promise in him,” his mother said. The Clemenses moved several miles upstate, to the Missouri River-side Hannibal, when he was four; the town would later inspire the fictional St. Petersburg of his two most famous works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).

Harper’s serialized Twain’s novels Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (printed under the name “Sieur Louis de Conte”) and Tom Sawyer, Detective in May and August 1895, respectively; they were published whole the following year by Harper & Brothers, which founded Harper’s and later acquired the rights to, among other Twain works, the earlier Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), which William Dean Howells, writing for Harper’s, provided with one of its few positive reviews.

Harper’s published many of Twain’s most revered stories and articles, among them “Mental Telegraphy,” “A Majestic Literary Fossil,” “A Petition to the Queen of England,” “Was it Heaven? Or Hell?,” and several additions to his “Unpublished chapters from the autobiography of Mark Twain,” including “My Debut as a Literary Person,” about the publication of “Forty-three Days” in Harper’s.

Twain was a Freemason and a member of the Society for Psychical Research and Yale University’s secret society Scroll and Key. He received an honorary degree from Oxford University and, according to the New York Times, was “Suggested for the Honor” of the 1907 Nobel Prize in Literature. Public schools, an U.S. Army installation in Germany, a bridge, a comet, and at least three awards are named after him.

"When Matti invited me on a tour of the neighborhood, I asked about security. 'The message has already been passed to ISIS that you’re here,' he said. 'But don’t worry. I guarantee I could bring even you in and out of the Islamic State.'"

$50,000

The Mall of America hired its first black Santa, a real estate company valued Mr. and Mrs. Claus’s North Pole home at $656,957, and it was reported that the price of the gifts from “Twelve Days of Christmas” went up by more than $200 in 2016, to $34,363.49.

"It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis."